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Will OpenSolaris 2010 Make It Out This Month?

06-01-2010, 01:20 PM

Phoronix: Will OpenSolaris 2010 Make It Out This Month?

Not only is the future for X12 unknown, but there is also an uncertain outlook for OpenSolaris. The successor to OpenSolaris 2009.06 (released last June) was supposed to be OpenSolaris 2010.02 and released in February of this year as implied by its date. However, four months later, there still are no signs of this OpenSolaris update. Sun Microsystems originally planned for the OpenSolaris operating system to be updated every six months, but now we are a year into OpenSolaris 2009.06 and this is clearly no longer the interest of Oracle, Sun's new owner...

Comment

FWIW, the rumour mill amongst ex-Sun partner community (at least those I talk with) is that:
- Oracle will come out with a slew of product announcements in the new financial year, including revised Solaris/OpenSolaris roadmaps. Until then they will be maintaining their very typical complete silence.
- OpenSolaris and Solaris will be "unified" somewhat as Solaris 11. There will be no new OpenSolaris until this happens, which may still be quite soon.

Take it with a grain of salt: it's a composite of several possibly informed guesses from maybe reliable sources.

I wouldn't take the silence from Oracle as a sign they have abondoned it however -- they are notorious for being very tight lipped about future plans. Of course, they'd be just as silent about killing the project until they were ready to announce it, but their silence to me does not speak for one or the other.

Comment

FWIW, the rumour mill amongst ex-Sun partner community (at least those I talk with) is that:
- Oracle will come out with a slew of product announcements in the new financial year, including revised Solaris/OpenSolaris roadmaps. Until then they will be maintaining their very typical complete silence.
- OpenSolaris and Solaris will be "unified" somewhat as Solaris 11. There will be no new OpenSolaris until this happens, which may still be quite soon.

Take it with a grain of salt: it's a composite of several possibly informed guesses from maybe reliable sources.

I wouldn't take the silence from Oracle as a sign they have abondoned it however -- they are notorious for being very tight lipped about future plans. Of course, they'd be just as silent about killing the project until they were ready to announce it, but their silence to me does not speak for one or the other.

I'm inclined to believe you, as your suggestions sound plausible, with or without your sources. The idea that Solaris/OpenSolaris will be unified makes a lot of sense - we can only hope that the open-source part is maintained, for the sake of a lot of projects based upon it. (Nexenta is one that springs to mind.)

The only point that I would raise is - we're already in the 'new' financial year. Or did you mean next April?

Comment

Not only is the future for X12 unknown, but there is also an uncertain outlook for OpenSolaris. The successor to OpenSolaris 2009.06 (released last June) was supposed to be OpenSolaris 2010.02 and released in February of this year as implied by its date. However, four months later, there still are no signs of this OpenSolaris update. Sun Microsystems originally planned for the OpenSolaris operating system to be updated every six months, but now we are a year into OpenSolaris 2009.06 and this is clearly no longer the interest of Oracle, Sun's new owner...

I personally don't like the current situation that OpenSolaris is in the hands of Oracle. I missed the good old Sun Microsystems. Uncertainty is certainly a hard problem. Let's make this one easy. Let's fork OpenSolaris as soon as possible. Fork OpenSolaris

Comment

I personally don't like the current situation that OpenSolaris is in the hands of Oracle. I missed the good old Sun Microsystems. Uncertainty is certainly a hard problem. Let's make this one easy. Let's fork OpenSolaris as soon as possible. Fork OpenSolaris

Forking OpenSolaris is really a bad idea, and i'll tell you why. OpenSolaris community can be strong when it is single. If we start distributing and forking it, there will be less developers who are involved working on the core but more packagers of their own distributions. Linux has faced that problem already, and I wouldn't like OpenSolaris to follow it that way.

OpenSolaris 2010 will come out soon. Be patient don't worry.

Comment

Forking OpenSolaris is really a bad idea, and i'll tell you why. OpenSolaris community can be strong when it is single. If we start distributing and forking it, there will be less developers who are involved working on the core but more packagers of their own distributions. Linux has faced that problem already, and I wouldn't like OpenSolaris to follow it that way.

OpenSolaris 2010 will come out soon. Be patient don't worry.

I don't think the community is as strong as before during the good old days at Sun Microsystems. Today at Oracle is actually quite different. The OpenSolaris community was created to support the OpenSolaris project. OpenSolaris is not totally free. Most of its parts remains closed. The community is only as strong as how Oracle today will allow them to be. Forking will create a new community around the OpenSolaris fork without the bounds of an imposing corporate entity such as Oracle. Forking does increase the chances of having different distributions and reduces the number of core developers. The latter clause actually is not that different today at Oracle. I doubt if Oracle retained the previous number of core developers for OpenSolaris.

Let's follow FreeBSD more closer than Linux. I believe there will be couple of distributions but if that grows more, then its a freedom we must accept. What is important is to make sure that OpenSolaris does not sink into another Unix death we know in the past. We can rewrite all the OpenSolaris parts and have it under a real open-source license.

It's either pseudo freedom or real freedom. If we decide to stay under Oracle then its either we will have to pay for OpenSolaris or expect a more featureless OpenSolaris. I intend to go for the real freedom. Let us fork OpenSolaris. If in case there wasn't a fork or such fork wasn't that successful then I will be happy to stay with FreeBSD instead.